Here's another round of thought provoking questions from my man MCK. I only send him an email once a month, but he gives me good stuff that puts me right where I need to be at the time. It's helping me to skate to where the puck will be in the next few weeks.
MCK: Something you may have thought of but not yet put into action is how to prioritize all these great ideas? What is going to start generating serious traffic to your site? Who are the people you want to attract to put up the highest quality content? How are you going to find them and ensure that they help you build up something great, as opposed to something just okay. The first wave of videos will set the tone. You've talked about doing funny videos because they'll be great for marketing. What about doing some exemplary videos to help guide people towards doing something you think would be most effective for this incarnation of fitness? Perhaps this could go right along with funny videos, but maybe effective comes first and then you start throwing in funny for a bit of freshness. What's more important -- everybody knowing about this site now or everybody knowing what a quality site you have later?
ALEX: The man has a point. Here I was today getting the site set up for translations into Asian languages. I'm ready to launch the thing internationally and yet I don't have a shred of content. This may be emblematic of that old debate in web design circles – what comes first, content or community? Well, as you'll soon see below, since I don't really believe there is any “fitness community” per se, I guess content must be king. How to generate it... umm, well, jeez, that's the hard part guys. I hope that there is some kind of formula for success in this initial stage, because I would certainly like to apply it in international context. While I am not averse to putting some videos up myself, like everyone else (even the most multitalented fitness instructors), I have a very limited supply of exercise knowledge.
This task will require a medium sized group of skilled contributors with a genuine diversity of material. Who am I targeting to put up that first wave of quality content? It's fairly obvious who knows the most about exercises and how to demonstrate them – those who get paid for teaching them. Still, the world of fitness instruction is a bit strange. It always seemed like an overly fake and feminine for my taste. I never felt at home in it and I doubt I ever will. The archetype in my mind is the very perky, dancy, sort of silly young women that bounce around mirrored aerobics rooms. I know most are nothing like that, but that's just how I perceive the group image. Thus, I worry about my ability to effectively about approaching them as a group with a marketing campaign.
I still think I can sell the idea of YouFitter to this audience, but it will require the right kind of packaging. There are three striking points: access, narcissism, and first mover advantage. First, this gives people universal access to helpful content in a setting that is more comfortable, convenient, and cheap (for most people) than a gym: their home. Second, the vast majority of fitness instructors start doing this job in large part because they love the attention of having other people watch and look up to them. Putting videos of yourself online offers that sweet possibility of amplifying one's exposure exponentially. Plus, all those people who never came to your classes can now see you online, which is perhaps even more prestigious these days. Third, there is a distinct possibility that the early producers in this medium could leapfrogging all the hard scratch work (and luck) it would normally take to move up the food chain to the level of fitness celebrity. Granted, most instructors have no interest in this, but some do, and those few will produce great stuff. Finally, there is potentially some money to be made here. If I can wrap these three messages into an effective piece of marketing material and get it out to as many small time instructors as possible, I have no doubt it will be effective.
I don't want to treat fitness instructors as a dumb or greedy audience. They are sort of my brethren after all and they certainly have their good points. The most important for me is that I really do believe the vast majority of them do the job because they love it. Their pay generally sucks and I'm sure the gender of the industry has something to do with this. They are easily controlled because they lack any kind of group solidarity... have you ever heard of a union gym? I blame their industry for not encouraging in organization and foresight. What's my evidence for this claim? Well, if they had any, they would have beat me to YouFitter. Perhaps they are too busy putting up credentialing barriers to try and raise their prestige and pay. Because I perceive them as weak, I feel a little bad about potentially making the future of their favorite role a little more precarious. Now, I've never had a fitness instructor to whom I've explained this idea recoil in horror because they thought I was going to put them out of business. I know that most people will never have their own mirrored exercise rooms for group aerobics in their homes with projectors hooked up to show YouFitter videos on the wall. However, I know the which way the currents of automation and mass media flow and I know that this will be a viable alternative to gym memberships for a lot of people. I think of this model as akin to the music industry. People will always show up for live concerts, but they'll spend the vast majority of their time listening to a customizable experience via recorded tracks at home. Whether or not YouFitter will hurt gyms in the long run is a prediction I won't be so arrogant as to make right now.
